Friday, June 18, 2010

How To Use Strong Keywords

This article was originally published on MyMark’s Corporate blog. MyMark is a professional social networking website. For this and other original MyMark blogs please visit http://www.mymark.com/blog

Of all the important parts of creating excellent content, using strong, keyword-rich content is among the most important. Keywords, links and site visits help searchers find your content and website. Without strong keywords your potential visitors won’t find you. If you are not using the same keywords in your content and meta tags that searchers use when they begin their search in Google, Bing, or other search engines, your site will not show up in the search results.

Keyword Research—Do some research to find out which keywords will best fit your content. First you need to realize that not all, if any, of your customers are familiar with industry jargon so create a broader list of keywords that your customers might be searching with. After you have created this list, run those keywords through a keyword research tool, such as Google Suggest to find out how many users are searching with those words, how many of those searched convert to sales, etc.

To get some good keyword suggestions, visit https://adwords.google.com/ and click on their link to get keyword ideas. From this page you can enter an industry phrase or your company website to get some good suggestions for keywords to use. The results also list the statistics of how many times each keyword is searched for every month, and other local statistics to help you determine which keywords will theoretically be the best to use as your tags.

Create Content Based on Keywords—After you have discovered the strongest keywords, create content about those keywords. You want to make sure that this is quality content but keep the topic centered around the specific keywords that you have chosen. You don’t have to use all of your keywords in one blog or article but try to use as many related keywords as possible.

Edit Content for Over-Use of Keywords - No one will read your content if it doesn’t make sense. Be sure to review your content to ensure its overall quality. Over-using keywords will make your content hard to understand. Above all, ensure quality for your readers and create something that they would like to read rather than something that only fits your purposes. In addition, if you over-use keywords in your document, the search engines will flag your content as potential abuse and not give you a high rating in search results.

Meta-Tags—Using Meta tags in your blogs, articles and press releases is basic and still important. This will help search engines find your relevant topics more quickly. Many blogs allow you to sort each blog into a general category of other similar blogs but using meta-tags is where you will really score points with search engines. Include all appropriate keywords in the Meta tags to ensure search engines will find your content and provide your content in the search engine results.

Good Titles—How well does your title relate to your content? Make sure that your title is directly related to your content. Use relevant keywords in your title as well. Search engines give more weight to titles than other content in your article. The title is also the first thing your potential visitors and readers will see in the search engine results so make sure it is enticing and relevant to their search.

Excellent Keywords are essential to future link-building and generating traffic to your website to increase your search engine rankings. Be very selective and use the most appropriate keywords for your content. Be sure to research relevant keywords and follow all of the steps to appropriately use strong keywords. Just because you create content doesn’t mean that people will come read it. Make it enticing and relevant to your reader.